Macworld: News: It's official: Apple is the new Microsoft

"Don’t look now, but the role of the industry’s biggest bully is increasingly played by Apple, not Microsoft...

People love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12 iPods in the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want to buy music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an Apple cell phone from AT&T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want only to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone? iTunes.

Apple not only “bundles” iTunes with multiple products, it forces you to use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you could always just download a competitor and ignore IE...

iTunes for Windows’ popularity isn’t driven by software product quality. ITunes is the slowest, clunkiest, most nonintuitive application on my system. But I need it because I love my iPods.
Glad I'm not the only one who hates iTunes

... Dad... goes to buy another player — this time, he hopes, with an FM radio in it. Several competitors offer this feature, but not iPods. He’s about to choose a new player with an FM radio when it hits him: None of his files — now totaling 300 songs and 50 movies — will play on the new player. He bought and paid for all this content, but it only works with iPods and iTunes.

Apple has an iPod customer for life. Microsoft never had this kind of monopoly power. Sorry, dad. I should have bought you a tie...

Jobs announced with a straight face that iPhone ringtones based on iTunes songs would cost the full price of the song, plus 99 cents extra. What? The full song costs 99 cents! How on Earth can Apple seriously charge the same amount again for the ability to hear just 30 seconds of the song — the same length as the free iTunes “samples”?

Apple fully understands the power of monopoly pricing. The company has sold the 8GB iPhone for two prices in its short, three months of existence: $599 and, now, $399. When the iPhone was the only way to get the whole multitouch, big-screen, Wi-Fi iPod experience — when the product had no alternatives — the price was $599. One analyst estimated Apple’s cost to build an iPhone is $245.83. I don’t know if that’s true but, if so, more than half the user cost was profit. That’s theater soda pricing. But as soon as Apple introduced an alternative to the iPhone — the iPod Touch — Apple dropped the price by one-third.

Imagine if another company were allowed to compete in the OS X media player market. These players would all drop to below $300. Don’t hold your breath, though; it’ll never happen. Apple has the power to exclude all others from software than runs on its media players...

Who’s innovating now? The LG KE850 was winning awards for its full-screen, touch-screen, on-screen keyboard before Jobs even announced the iPhone.

The best thing about the iPhone and iPod Touch — the warm-and-fuzzy multitouch UI with gestures — wasn’t new, either. Various labs have been demonstrating similar UIs for more than a decade, and even Microsoft demonstrated a fully realized 3G UI in May, well before Apple shipped the iPhone. Microsoft will ship its tabletop UI, called Microsoft Surface, in November, and Apple will likely enter this space with a 3G UI months or years after Microsoft does.

And Wi-Fi in a media player? Ha! Microsoft’s funky Zune had that almost a year before Apple did and SanDisk’s Sansa Connect with Wi-Fi was released last June. Apple even stole the name for its iPod Touch product, according to HTC, which sells a touch-screen smart phone called the HTC Touch...

Although full details haven’t been revealed, NBC apparently wanted more “flexibility” to charge higher prices for its TV shows on iTunes. Apple said no, and NBC was sent packing. NBC now plans to sell shows on alternative locations, such as its own Web site and on Amazon.com. Prediction: NBC will come crawling back to Apple and beg the company for inclusion, and on Apple’s terms. Why? Because iTunes is increasingly becoming the only venue in which media companies can succeed selling music and TV show.

Jobs rules like Bill Gates never did. If you want to succeed in the digital music or downloadable TV business, you’ll do things his way."


I fully expect the Mac whores to use similar arguments to those of Christian apologists.